


Memory

by The_Bookkeeper



Series: Hi Qui Custodiunt Ipsum Custodem [4]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-28
Packaged: 2017-11-27 08:37:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Bookkeeper/pseuds/The_Bookkeeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Bad Wolf lets the singing drown out the burning, the Forever Man holds on to what he can, and the Oncoming Storm has no shelter from himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a series, but can be read alone. All you need to know is that it's a post-Runaway Bride, pre-Torchwood fixit in which Rose, Jack, and the tenth Doctor are travelling together.

Rose Tyler is twenty-four (give or take a few months for timey-wimeyness) and she is very selective in what she remembers. She has a job in their dysfunctional little family — she’s the idealist to Jack’s cynic, the mercy to the Doctor’s ruthlessness, the light to their darkness — and she can’t manage that if she remembers everything that she’s seen and done and learned.   
  
When it’s necessary, or unavoidable, she remembers that she is never going to see her parents or her little brother again, that Jack is doomed a bleak, lonely life of immortality because of her actions, that the Doctor is always, always teetering on the knife-edge between genius and madness, self-sacrifice and self-destruction.   
  
The rest of the time, Rose forgets.   
  
~~~  
  
Jack Harkness is one-hundred and seventy-seven (he thinks, though it’s a bit hard to keep track), and he forgets everything he can afford to. Human minds are not meant to hold more than about a century’s worth of information, and while Jack is not stupid by any stretch, he’s not a genius, either.   
  
Strangely enough, the things he forgets seem to have nothing to do with when they happened. He can’t remember his Torchwood password or the name of the last person he slept with or even what his  _own_  name was before he was called Jack Harkness, but he can remember the suffocating feeling as he watched despair grow in Suzie’s eyes the days before he left and the thrill of the Doctor’s icy lips on his before he died for the first time and the last words Gray said to him before the Invasion changed everything.  
  
Jack never forgets the important things.  
  
~~~  
  
The Doctor is nine hundred years old (he’s been telling his companions and himself for so long that he very nearly believes it), and he can’t let himself forget anything. He just sorts his memories into boxes and shuffles them around in his head, with labels that says things like ‘CAUTION’ and ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ and ‘IMPORTANT.’   
  
Unfortunately, some — most — important, useful things, like how to fight Cybermen and pilot the TARDIS and dance, are all mixed up with messy, painful things, like Adric and Romana and Reinette, and he can’t look at Jack without feeling his stillness and knowing that there are things far worse than death, and he can’t look at Rose without feeling Time flowing and knowing that death and its inevitability are plenty terrible in and of themselves, and he can’t look at his own hands without seeing the blood of a thousand species, hearing the screams of his people echoing in the emptiness where his planet used to be —  
  
The Doctor never, ever forgets.


End file.
